Page fault, GEOM problem?? (also: using a ASUS A7N8X-XE/nForce2 utlra400?)

[Johan Ström]

On 23 jan 2006, at 14.15, Michael S. Eubanks wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-01-23 at 10:24 +0100, Johan Ström wrote:
>> On 23 jan 2006, at 09.53, Michael S. Eubanks wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 2006-01-23 at 06:43 +0100, Johan Ström wrote:
>>>
>>> Wish I could be of more help. :)  Have you tried to toggle the  
>>> sysctl
>>> dma flags?  I've seen similar posts in the past with read timeouts
>>> caused from dma being enabled.
>>>
>>> # sysctl -a | grep dma
>>> ...
>>> hw.ata.ata_dma: 1      <=== Try turning this one off (1 ==> 0).
>>> hw.ata.atapi_dma: 1
>>> ...
>>
>> Disabling DMA, wouldnt that give me pretty bad performance?
>>
>>> -Michael
>>>
>
> If it was not the problem, you could always change it back.  It  
> *should*
> be possible to simply set the control mode on those two disks (``man
> rc.early'', ``man atacontrol'').  Unfortunately, the problem is  
> noted as
> errata in several FreeBSD versions tending to appear on SATA disks.  I
> believe this is also a problem with some linux setups.  If you google
> ``FreeBSD hw.ata.ata_dma RELEASE'' you will eventually find the
> following page relating to Asus motherboards:
>
> http://www.ryxi.com/freebsd/63-668-write-dma-other-similar-errors- 
> read.shtml
>
> I picked it out based on the following line in the dmesg output:
>
>> Nov 29 20:46:09 elfi kernel: ACPI APIC Table: <ASUS   A7V333  >
>
> I'd say it's worth a shot.  You might even try turning both the flags
> off temporarily to see what you get.  Your guess is as good as  
> mine.  :)
>

Okay, tried turning it of.. The disk IO speeds went even lower...  
whoping 9-10MB/s and lots of load ;)
And since the crashes comes randomly (haven't been able to reproduce  
them "on deamon") i dont realy want to run it like this.. ;)

I did another test. I moved the controller card and the disks to my  
MSI K8N Neo motherboard (with AMD64 3200+ etc), and immediatly I got  
write speeds of ~49MB/s:

  $ dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile.zero bs=1024 count=1000024
1024024576 bytes transferred in 21.974227 secs (46601164 bytes/sec)

Compared to
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile.zero bs=1024 count=1000024
1024024576 bytes transferred in 78.897708 secs (12979142 bytes/sec)

All tests where done in
/dev/mirror/gm0s1f on /usr (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates,  
acls)

Soo.. I guess this mobo is just plain fucked and needs to be replaced  
with something newer ;)
Bad thing is, this is Socket A.. so there isnt so many choices left  
in the mobo market..

However, i found a ASUS A7N8X-XE NF ULTRA 400 SOCKET A with Nforce2  
Ultra 400 chipset.. Does anyone have any knowledge about this chipset?
How well does it work with Fbsd? I'll do some googling but if someone  
is using this successfully or unsuccessfully, please let me know :)

--
Johan